I'm concerned that replacing the hard drive will not resolve the "program info will run out" issue &, therefore, the better option may be to change to a Premier as I am not aware of them having this issue.

The only effect the hard drive seems to have on the problem is the amount of space. The problem does not seem to occur on TiVos with standard space. Larger drives, either internal or external, seem to be a requirement to have the problem.

One thing you can try is to disconnect your TiVo from the Internet for a couple of days. You can do this by unplugging your TiVo's Ethernet cable or wireless adapter. -- Doug

I plan to move to the country in a couple of years (no cable available) & would prefer to have a TiVo that gets OTA - thus the reason for the 2 tuner Premier (would love to get a 4 tuner unit though). Thoughts anyone?

Options, as I see it; based on your situation as explained above:
Take current TiVo off line; buy a XL4 and enjoy TiVo until you move, then sell the XL4. Also: TiVo will sell you a life sub on the premier for $99, if you buy the XL4 from TiVo.
Obtain a cable co DVR and suffer with the shortcomings until you move.
Continue the current program reboot, deny T/A power or disconnect USB or Either Net connection as Doug suggests.

The only effect the hard drive seems to have on the problem is the amount of space. The problem does not seem to occur on TiVos with standard space. Larger drives, either internal or external, seem to be a requirement to have the problem.

One thing you can try is to disconnect your TiVo from the Internet for a couple of days. You can do this by unplugging your TiVo's Ethernet cable or wireless adapter. -- Doug

Yes; this was/is the problem with my S3-OLED.
Before, with a 1TB expander and continued after 2TB DVR_Dude internal upgrade drive was installed.(TiVo said the drive(s) were failing)

I can't get the unit to record programs since I started this latest reboot mess. I called TiVo today & they ended up offering an exchange. Cost would be $149 for a refurbished HD & $199 for lifetime service for a total of $348. I ended up taking Teeps advice & ordered a new Premier XL4. $399.99 for the DVR & $399.99 for lifetime. I can't wait to be free of the "Program info will run out" headache - and am definitely looking forward to all the new features. I called Charter to schedule the cable card install and they told me I can transfer the card to the new unit myself and just call them to activate - that was definitely good news. Thanks to all who provided input. The old unit has lifetime so, if I choose, maybe I can sell it and get a little money. I think tonight I will try one last ditch effort of clearing everything, disconnecting the external drive and kickstart 57 to keep it going for at least the time being.

Do you have a reference for that? I can't find it on their site but would be very interested. Thanks, Doug

You have to ask: I called TiVo sales about the purchase of a Premier XL4, last month.
During the conversation, before committing to a purchase, I asked what it would cost to convert my S3-OLED to life time sub; without hesitation the agent said $99.
That, sealed the deal.
Purchases made.

To add, 2 days later they dropped the price on the Elite $49. So, I called and asked for the discount... score!
Instant price drop given for the asking.

You have to ask: I called TiVo sales about the purchase of a Premier XL4, last month.
During the conversation, before committing to a purchase, I asked what it would cost to convert my S3-OLED to life time sub; without hesitation the agent said $99.
That, sealed the deal.
Purchases made.

To add, 2 days later they dropped the price on the Elite $49. So, I called and asked for the discount... score!
Instant price drop given for the asking.

You seem to have confused getting lifetime on an S3 of some kind when buying an S4 of some kind with getting lifetime on an S4 when buying a more expensive S4.

The lamp timer solution did not work well for me. It was hit or miss as far as the TA being recognized after it was powered up again. I have set my router to deny Internet access to the TiVo for three consecutive days each week. GC seems to always complete on the second day and I haven't missed any programming.

Questors - out if curiosity were you able to set your router up on a schedule to do this, or do you do this manually each week? I have been manually unplugging my TA every other week or so to manage the problem because I don't want to deal with daily messages regarding the TA, but would love to try denying my TiVo Internet connectivity even for five days out of the week. I have a Linksys router but don't see any obvious way of scheduling these kind of rules.

Questors - out if curiosity were you able to set your router up on a schedule to do this, or do you do this manually each week? I have been manually unplugging my TA every other week or so to manage the problem because I don't want to deal with daily messages regarding the TA, but would love to try denying my TiVo Internet connectivity even for five days out of the week. I have a Linksys router but don't see any obvious way of scheduling these kind of rules.

Yes, I set up a schedule. I have a D-Link router and there is an Advanced tab, under that is Access Control and you can set a policy by IP by days of the week. I have mine set to deny all access to the TiVo on Thursday though Saturday. Two days without access seems to be enough to let GC complete. It is easy to enable or disable the policy once you set it up. I first set it up when I went on a three week vacation and it has worked fine since.

I had my tivo on a wireless bridge plugged in to a smart strip. So tivo could not update for days sometimes and i had no gc problem.

I unplugged my last tivo yesterday after i got my ceton echo

Quote:

Originally Posted by questors

Yes, I set up a schedule. I have a D-Link router and there is an Advanced tab, under that is Access Control and you can set a policy by IP by days of the week. I have mine set to deny all access to the TiVo on Thursday though Saturday. Two days without access seems to be enough to let GC complete. It is easy to enable or disable the policy once you set it up. I first set it up when I went on a three week vacation and it has worked fine since.

Yes, I set up a schedule. I have a D-Link router and there is an Advanced tab, under that is Access Control and you can set a policy by IP by days of the week. I have mine set to deny all access to the TiVo on Thursday though Saturday. Two days without access seems to be enough to let GC complete. It is easy to enable or disable the policy once you set it up. I first set it up when I went on a three week vacation and it has worked fine since.

Thanks questors. I have mine (a Linksys router) set up to deny the Tivo access Monday thru Thursday. At least on this first cycle GC did not complete. (I thought maybe it had b/c I wasn't getting the "program info will run out" warnings but I just tried to schedule a season pass and it told me I'm out of program info). I did notice that the Tivo failed to phone home when I checked in the middle of the week but I'll have to keep playing with it.

You'd think the people here who bought TiVos and pay the subscription fee every month would have dug up enough clues by now for TiVo to figure out what the problem is and come up with a fix.

We call it a subscription, but technically it's not to the guide data, it's to the "TiVo Service".

So regardless of the hardware one purchased upon which to receive the service, one should be equally deserving of the service working properly.

I agree. I never opted for Lifetime on any of my TiVo boxes (this is my third but the only one I have in operation) and have been paying monthly on this box for almost six years now. I did so happily believing I was getting real value from the "service" with HME etc.

Now I have any number of devices that do all the extra things TiVo did - Netflix, home video rendering and Pandora being the primary things in my house - and arguably better than tivo does - that its hard to justify. Add that to the fact that tuning adapters and cable cards basically suck and don't work all that well (for my household at least). This bug (self inflicted though it may be) ia probably the last straw for me. I'm pretty sure this will be my last TiVo brand DVR unless something significant changes.

Earlier this year I had envisioned having a new generation box and a bunch of streaming receivers in my household. I've lost belief in Tivo's ability to deliver a superior experience beyond basic DVR functionality - and I'm not convinced they are doing it all that well on even the new devices (though I have no firsthand experience with them).

After months and months of disconnecting the USB from TA to Tivo once a week so that Garbage collection could occur and program data would update, suddenly the GC is now taking place each day without any intervention from me. 5 straight days so far. Has never been this good. It's behaving just as good as my Premiere elite now. Did TIVO finally fix this, or am I just having a run of good luck?

After months and months of disconnecting the USB from TA to Tivo once a week so that Garbage collection could occur and program data would update, suddenly the GC is now taking place each day without any intervention from me. 5 straight days so far. Has never been this good. It's behaving just as good as my Premiere elite now. Did TIVO finally fix this, or am I just having a run of good luck?

Not sure what changed for you.

But, I checked it on my TCD648250 last night and it had not completed a GC since Friday. And that is powering down the T/A every night.

Ugh. The original problem TiVo has moved to a new location but is still using the TA. It's been working flawlessly for at least eight months. Until now when I get the S03 error. I've had the TA unplugged for 17 hours and attempted two connections...both if which failed. I'm on my third now and it's Loading at 4%. My GC is a day old.

Why now? After 8 months?

Talk about frustrating.

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you need to unplug it from the internet to for a few days. your tivo has to much guide data.

I hate the s03 error but i dont use tivo anymore i just use windows media center for ceton cable card adaptor

Quote:

Originally Posted by sushikitten

Ugh. The original problem TiVo has moved to a new location but is still using the TA. It's been working flawlessly for at least eight months. Until now when I get the S03 error. I've had the TA unplugged for 17 hours and attempted two connections...both if which failed. I'm on my third now and it's Loading at 4%. My GC is a day old.

This is how I worked around the problem. I have an S3 on which I'd replaced the hard drive and was also having the S03 problem and going through the painful clear/delete workaround. Then at some point I replaced my upgraded drive with an even larger one, and something curious happened. My problem went away for a while, though eventually it came back. I got to wondering if the disk being full (of deleted programs) had something to do with it. So I experimentally tried manually deleting all of the deleted programs occasionally to make sure the disk would never fill. Sure enough, I didn't have the problem come back until I quit doing it and let the disk fill.

Permanently deleting already-deleted programs is NOT fun and not what you'd want to do on a long-term basis. I was originally thinking that if this worked, there might be a way break into the Unix OS of an S3 and put in some kind of cron job to periodically delete deleted program older than some threshold. But by that time I'd heard about the timer trick (brilliantly simple!) and adopted that instead of pursuing this any further. Only problem with that is, I tend to record a lot of old-time movies and series that only show up in the wee hours, so I have to be careful.

I don't claim to understand exactly why this worked, so I can't offer any assurance it will work for anybody else. But it fixed it for me.

After months and months of disconnecting the USB from TA to Tivo once a week so that Garbage collection could occur and program data would update, suddenly the GC is now taking place each day without any intervention from me. 5 straight days so far. Has never been this good. It's behaving just as good as my Premiere elite now. Did TIVO finally fix this, or am I just having a run of good luck?

I had my S3 OLED on a timer for months. Then I thought I'd try it without the timer. All was well, with GC occurring every few days. That was 18 months ago and I've only had one "running out of data" problem. I fixed that one by unplugging the TA overnight.

I doubt TiVo has done anything in the software. I just think the problem is intermittent, at least for some of us.

My original S3 gets this all the time. Rebooting eventually leads to a hard error, but works for a year or so. Rerunning the setup clears things out and fixes this temporarily too. From what I have researched, my problem is due to the guide info taking to long to process. So Tivo connects, processes but does not complete before next connection. Next connection resets the process etc etc. Tivo suggests pulling the network cable to let it complete. My solution is to activate parental controls on the router and block Tivo one day a week. Been working like this for couple years.